Monday, 2 June 2008

Ten Dead Men stuff and filming...

There have been some minor Ten Dead Men developments this weekend. Our second print review was printed in Combat magazine. Once again it's a very positive review slightly tainted by the fact that Ross and Phil get credited for the script, and I don't get mentioned at all. On Saturday, reading the article in the queue in Smiths, I got very angry about this. It's not the fact that I wasn't mentioned, it was the fact that credit was given for the quality of the script but that credit wasn't attributed to me! I spoke to Ross about it and there was talk of printing retractions and so on, but having thought about it I'm not that bothered now. It's still a good review and there are some quotes about the script I can use. Plus, a much as I don't want to downplay any of the good press we get, it is in a specialist martial arts magazine unlikely to be read by many film people. But it does stand as the first time I've been misrepresented (or perhaps just ignored, but it doesn't sound as good) by the press - something of a career landmark I feel.I've also arranged a second Brighton-based Ten Dead Men screening at Moviebar - a monthly film night at the Cornerstone pub which I'm sure I've mentioned before. The website is www.moviebar.co.uk and if you look hard enough there's a rather embarrassing photo of my team winning the film quiz with me looking exceptionally drunk. Anyway, it should be an interesting night and at least it's a chance for the handful of my friends who missed the first screening to see the film.Speaking of Moviebar, the event is organised by Chris Cook who also directed the Penalty King which is the film I've been subtitling in German for the last two months. It's taken far longer than it needed to, but I finally finished at 3am Saturday morning. So that's one more thing off the list.My two feature projects for Ross are coming along fine. I'm 15 pages into the first one and hope to have a draft finished early next week. I'm also expecting notes back on Hit the Big Time shortly, although when I'm going to get chance to rewrite it I'm not sure.Onto short horror films. If you go back through this blog a few months you'll find that I was at one stage working on two short horror films for an online competition - one I was writing, the other I was directing. The first never came to anything. I was working with a director I met on Shooting People who had me redrafting the thing four times which is never a good sign when the script is two pages long. Having tried every combination of scenes and events to tell the same story I called it a day as I was starting to get busy with other things. I got an e-mail from the director not long ago and despite his best efforts to put the project together it never really worked out. To be fair it was quite ambitious for a two minute film so I'm not hugely disappointed.The second one has had a much longer gestation period, partly due to a lack of time and to be honest a lack of commitment on my part. I'm still not particularly comfortable with directing, especially at this level when you have to do so many of the other jobs as well. Also with my writing workload getting bigger I just didn't have the time to think about it. But it finally reached a point where it was either do it or call the whole thing off, so we're filming tonight. I'll report on how it went tomorrow.

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About Me

I'm a writer with a day-job which means I don't usually get down to writing until around ten in the evening, hence the blog title. My first feature as a writer, Ten Dead Men, was released on DVD in 2009. I'm currently working on a series of short horror films following the adventures of a witch called Jenny Ringo. There are currently three films in the series - Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw, Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell and Jenny Ringo and the Infinite Spellbook. You can find out more at www.jennyringo.com. I live in Worthing, which is a bit like Innsmouth.